the Revision Division

UK: Subway caves to Muslim demands, removes pork, sells only halal meat.

In the caption on a photo accompanying this article, the reliably dimwitted Daily Mail writes: “Nearly 200 Subway branches across the UK and Ireland have cut out ham and bacon, selling only halal meat, in response to demand from their multicultural customers.”

Their “multicultural customers”? And exactly what multiplicity of cultures demanded that Subway drop ham and bacon and sell only halal meat? Most likely that demand came from people of only one culture, and has rendered these 200 Subway restaurants less multicultural than before: now non-Muslims in Britain who would like to enjoy a Chicken and Bacon Ranch Melt or an Italian sub with pepperoni are out of luck: Muslims and Sharia-compliant dhimmis are the only ones who will be served.

FRANCE: Activities of the new National Front mayors.

The National Front mayor of Villers-Cotterêts in Northern France . . . announced the town would not hold a commemoration for the abolition of slavery. Mayor Franck Briffault rejected the “continual self-inflicted guilt” of the event which has been held every year since 2007. . . .

Mayor Cyril Nauth in Parisian suburb Mantes-La-Ville has declared himself “hostile” to a planned Islamic prayer room, which was approved by his Socialist party predecessor. The mayor in the Riviera town of Fréjus, David Rachline ran on his opposition to a mosque there which is already under construction. He’s called for a referendum on the matter. . . .

Activists got the boot from their city-owned offices after new National Front mayor Steeve Briois was elected in northern France. The Hénin-Beaumont mayor said the League of Human Rights, which opposed his candidacy, had become “politicized” and thus was no longer legally entitled to public subsidies.

JOHN S. ROSENBERG: Smith College Confronts Transgender [sic] Issues.

Smith explained that it does not discriminate against transgender [sic] students who are enrolled and indeed boasts that it “has a diverse and dynamic student body that includes individuals who identify as transgender [sic]. Students at Smith, whatever their gender [sic] identity or gender [sic] expression are diverse, accomplished, and various in their views.” Nevertheless, it insisted, “[i]n its mission and legal status, Smith is a women’s college … and expects that, to be eligible for review, a student’s application and supporting documentation (transcripts, recommendations, etc.) will reflect her status as a woman.” . . .

The protesters are protesting, a leader of the demonstrations stated, because they “want the college to accept a supplemental letter with an application that attests that the applicant while identified as male on high school transcripts identifies and lives as a woman.”

Unclear from the material I have seen, however, is how both Smith and its protesting students would feel about female-to-male transgender [sic] applicants. . . .

Here’s another question, and not just for Smithies: since our new understanding of civil rights, resting as it does on the assumption that gender [sic] and race are “social constructs,” regards self-identification as the controlling determinant of individual identity and thus requires Smith to classify as a woman anyone who says she’s a woman, should not all institutions regard as black or Hispanic anyone who says he or she is black or Hispanic, regardless or color or contradictory information in the student’s records? Should not a refusal to do so, a refusal to regard a student as black simply because he or she is not, well, black be regarded as blatant racial discrimination?

Earlier: If We Can Pick Our Gender [sic], Can We Pick Our Age? Our Race?

TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE: Time’s Joe Klein: CNN an ‘Embarrassment To Our Profession’.

Related: The Onion: TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults.

IT’S THE CONSENSUS: Forty Years Ago, Scientists Were “Nearly Unanimous” That Global Cooling Will Reduce The Food Supply.

COOL: Ex Libris: The Bookplates of 31 Famous Men.

HERE WE GO: U.S. Justice Department to collect, study arrest data for racial bias.

“THIS is what women’s liberation looks like. No, not the hordes of men and women having extramarital sex, and not the cohorts of stylish choice mommies raising children on her own (with significant contributions from ex husbands or the Big Daddy State), holding down two jobs to make ends meet, although both are features of it. No, I’m talking about the hand-in-glove counterpart to women’s liberation…men’s liberation. If women can be liberated from the chains of sexual fidelity and lifelong martial commitment, what’s keeping men shackled to the yoke of financial responsibility? Not much, it seems.”

DETROIT: At Utash Court Hearing, Suspects’ Relatives Laugh At Assault Details.

MARK PERRY: Statistical gender [sic] disparities apparently prove gender [sic] bias, except when the statistical disparity favors women?

AND I DON’T WANT MY KIDS TO BE TAUGHT MATH BY A WOMAN: I don’t want my kids sitting next to a man on a plane.

PATHETIC: Caught on Tape: Kids Admit to Being Brainwashed at School on Fracking. They don’t so much “admit” as reveal.

NO KIDDING? Speed reading apps may kill comprehension.

“Removing eye movements from the reading process is precisely the fatal flaw in such speed-reading apps and the reason why they will not be useful for reading any text that is not extremely easy or short,” the authors conclude.

That may be overselling the results a bit. Although the large number of trials ensured that all the results were statistically significant, they still relied on only 40 college students. In theory, at least, college students spend a lot of their time trying to extract meaning from textbook sentences, and so they might not reflect the general population that well. It’s probably worth extending the analysis to a more diverse population, as well as a group that had experience using something like Spritz for their reading.

LEADER OF FAILED ALL-FEMALE UNIT commits suicide; reason unknown.

The much-ballyhooed F.E.T. [Female Engagement Team] 55-woman detachment she commanded soon imploded, no fault of its earnest leader.

“A number of women got pregnant and were sent back to the States,” an officer in the know [said]. “Others were producing pornography for American GI’s, and some of the raunchy photos included females in lesbian poses.”

Whether this “failure,” a first in the intense and highly-successful career of Kelly Hasselman, was enough to send her off the rails, or her death has a more sinister origin, we cannot say for sure at this early date.

Related: The Failure of Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan.

ACE: Media Matters For America, Champion Of Unions And Worker’s Rights Actively Opposing Its Workers Attempt To Unionize.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Taqiyya about Taqiyya. “Readers interested in learning more about the role of deception in Islam—and how to respond to those trying to dismiss it as an ‘Islamophobic fantasy’—are encouraged to read on.”

MODEL WELFARE STATE: Eight of ten Swedes now believe they won’t get a pension that will cover their living expenses after retiring. “Many respondents overestimated how much money they would get when they retire. Fifty-six percent had hopes for their future pension that won’t be satisfied at their current income level and within the current system. “

UK: Paul Weston Could Face 2 Years in Jail for Quoting Churchill.

The leader of the Liberty GB party Paul Weston, who was arrested on Saturday for breaching a Section 27 Dispersal Notice, is now possibly facing imprisonment for 2 years.

Mr Weston, a candidate in the 22 May European Elections in the South East, was arrested on 26 April in front of Winchester Guildhall for quoting in public a passage critical of Islam written by Winston Churchill, using a megaphone.

He spent several hours in a cell at Winchester Police Station, after which the original charge of breaching a Section 27 Dispersal Notice was dropped and Mr Weston was ‘re-arrested’ for a Racially Aggravated Crime, under Section 4 of the Public Order Act, which carries a potential prison sentence of 2 years.

IT’S REAL: Diggers Find Atari’s E.T. Games In Landfill. “Producers of a documentary dug in a southeastern New Mexico landfill in search of millions of cartridges of the game that has been called the worst game in the history of video gaming and were buried there in 1983.”

UK: Jobless mum advises her daughter, 19, to get pregnant – for an easy life on benefits.

Her mother, who has another daughter, Amie, aged 12, said: ‘I am better off on benefits. I refuse to work for a pittance and struggle.

‘I don’t have any qualifications so it is easier to claim money than persuade an employer to give me a job.

‘I told Melissa to work the system and have a baby so she could claim more benefits, get a house of her own and have a better life. ‘I don’t want her to work for peanuts in a low-pay job.’

As Ali G once asked of MP Tony Benn, “Does the welfare not just encourage young girls to go out and get jiggy with Mr. Biggy?”

Earlier: The US Welfare State At Work. “They encourage you to stay on the programs, and then if you do try to get off of ‘em, they penalize you . . . If you go out and make ten dollars, they gonna deduct twenty dollars for you making that ten. So, you really can’t get off of it. And then they see someone like me who wants to go to work. Well, then if I went to work, every dime that I would make will go to child care anyway, so why work?”

WUSSING OUT: The rise of ‘social’ surrogacy: The women choosing not to carry their own babies for fear of hurting their careers or ruining their bodies. “‘I call these cases designer surrogacy,’ said San Diego-based fertility doctor Lorni Arnold, whose patients have included a socialite ‘who didn’t want to get fat’ and a runner about to do a marathon.”

ANN COULTER: What You Won’t Read In The Papers About The ‘Central Park Five’. “The plaintiffs are demanding $50 million apiece — for going to prison for a rape that they committed.”

ANYTHING ELSE WOULD BE “RACIST”: FBI Video Warning About Spying for China Stars White College Student.

This effort by the FBI completely fails to mention that the people who spy for China are almost always ethnic Chinese. And they don’t need promises of money and sex.

When Chinese intelligence approaches overseas Chinese—or even naturalized citizens of other countries—all they have to do is emphasize shared ancestry. Even the FBI admits this. A government handbook on intelligence states that 98 percent of the people that China targets for espionage are Chinese-Americans, and warns that ethnic solidarity is the main recruitment tool.

David Szady, a former director of the FBI’s counterintelligence department (the same department that produced the “Pawns” video), says that the Chinese government does not consider these people Chinese-Americans. They call them “overseas Chinese.” Mr. Szady notes that the politically correct pretense that American citizens never fall for nationalist appeals is one of the biggest obstacles to the FBI’s counterespionage work.

JANET BLOOMFIELD: What happens when Jezebel lets a man take over posting for the weekend? Heh. Brilliance, quite frankly!

One weekend, one man, and we have women sabotaging birth control, women suing dead children she herself killed, women lapdancing young boys, women sucking off horses and just to round things out, Schrayber reposted an article about Lauren Cox should not be in Time’s 100 most influential issue, because she’s *gasp* not that influential.

Oh dear. Something tells me Mark is in for a spanking Monday morning. He appears to have missed the memo that women are not to be criticized, their bad behaviours are not to be pointed out and their disgusting sexual proclivities are not to be questioned.

Why?

Because the commenters demonstrate beautifully what a pack of hypocritical, contradictory, man-hating, apologist scumbags modern media feminists are.

PRIORITIES: Woman posts about ‘Happy’ song on Facebook seconds before fatal head-on collision with truck.

Investigators say some of Sanford’s friends and family told them about a Facebook post that Sanford made around the same time as the crash. Investigators discovered the Facebook post was made seconds before the deadly crash.

“The Facebook text happened at 8:33. We got the call on the wreck at 8:34,” explains Lt. Chris Weisner, with the High Point Police Department.

Investigators say Sanford’s Facebook post read: “The happy song makes me HAPPY.”

Good thing she got the word out. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know how the song made her feel.

LYDIA MCGREW: How to handle converts.

The person who has just converted or reconverted to Christianity is probably not the person who should be telling us all “what the church needs to be doing differently to be attractive to people like me.” It’s tempting of course to think that that is exactly what we should be asking, but I submit that to think so is to bring a market model into the church where it does not belong. Much as I love the free market, the church shouldn’t think of itself as selling a product. New converts or reconverts are not members of focus groups, and their job should be to learn and grow in grace, wisdom, and understanding of the truths of the Bible, not to tell us, “What did you like about our product? How can we sell it more effectively to others like you?” . . .

I think the problem runs deeper and really goes back to our approach to evangelization. I warned here about a bait and switch as regards homosexuality: The speaker there tells his audience not to say too much to self-professed homosexuals about the Bible’s position on their activities, because that might make them feel unwelcome. As I pointed out in that post, there is a great danger, then, that such people will really never get it, that they will assume, since they have been told “come as you are,” that the church welcomes their continuing in their lifestyle even after they have allegedly turned to Jesus. And it gets a little embarrassing to turn around at that point and say, “Well, yes, we did try to be a welcoming and gay-friendly church, but you have to stop that now. Didn’t you know?” Chances are good that it is they who will change the church rather than vice versa.

HOLLYWOOD’S Gay Rape Scandal: A Classic Agency Problem.

The reality is, gays are powerful people with fairly deviant sex drives who use their power in Hollywood to rape teen age and younger boys. The Hollywood gays are more Jerry Sandusky than the characters on Modern Family.

So why are these scandals coming out now?

Simply, Hollywood is running out of money. . . .

The video tape money, people paying for old movies on Video tape, and then the DVD money, kept Hollywood afloat for a while. Until Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, and Pirate Bay put an end to the easy, cheap, effortless stream of cash flooding into Hollywood and keeping the Agents of Stupidity afloat.

Now, Hollywood faces a big challenge. The payoff money to various victims of abuse, gay and otherwise (I’m sure) is no longer there. So, lawsuits.

HERETIC: Christian day-care worker fired for having opinions.

It appears that Miss Mbuyi never hid her faith but had had at least a few conversations with the lesbian co-worker about it, even visiting her in the hospital after an accident and giving her a Bible. Mbuyi asserts that she stated her opinion on the Bible’s teaching about homosexuality only after being asked by the co-worker about it.

“If I tell you that God is OK with that I am lying to you,” she stated – after being invited to express her opinion by her co-worker, in what she now recognizes was meant to provoke her. [Sounds familiar.]

Mbuyi had added that God “does love you and says you should come to Him as you are.” At that point, she claims, the co-worker “became emotional and went off to report me to my manager.”

She described her disciplinary hearing as “hopelessly one-sided because they put my accuser’s claims to me as fact, without any forewarning and so I wasn’t prepared. It seemed to me they had already made up their minds to justify sacking me, before hearing my side of the story.”

“THE MUCH-COVETED INGUINAL CREASE”: Building a Bigger Action Hero.

Since 5 percent body fat is nobody’s natural condition, fitness plans are geared to peak on the days of the sex scenes or shirtless moments. To prep for these days, trainers will dehydrate a client like a boxing manager sweats a fighter down to weight. They often switch him to a low- or no-sodium diet three or four days in advance, fade out the carbohydrates, brew up diuretics like herbal teas, and then push cardio to sweat out water – all to accentuate muscle definition for the key scenes.

The last-minute pump comes right before the cameras roll. Philip Winchester, the hero of Cinemax’s action series Strike Back, recalls seeing the technique for the first time on the set of Snatch: “Hundreds of extras were standing around,” he recalls, “and Brad Pitt would drop down and do 25 push-ups before each scene. I thought, ‘Why is he showing off?’ ” Then Winchester figured it out. “I realized he was just jacking himself up: getting blood flowing to the muscles. I’d always wondered, ‘How do actors look so jacked all the time?’ Well, they don’t. Now we ask: Is it a push-up scene? When I shot that Strike Back poster, I was doing push-ups like a madman, saying, ‘Take the picture now! Take it now!'”

UK: Paul Weston Arrested for Quoting Churchill. No love for The River War, evidently.

I WOULDN’T KNOW: Are Older Men’s Sperm Really Any Worse? Short version: We’re not sure.

AMERICAN CHILDREN Are The Prisoners Of Women.

Over fifty [40] percent of men are born into single mother households . . . Women who choose to keep their children’s father around do so only on a provisional basis, with the legal right to separate him from his children at any time she chooses. For all intents and purposes, the children are hers, and she merely allows their father to see them. . . .

After infancy, the boy is sent to school where over seventy percent of his teachers will be women. Hereafter, it won’t matter if he has a father present, because eight hours a day will be spent attempting to please to women, in an institution run by women for women. School is a feminine environment, where feminine traits like obedience and cooperation are valued over masculine risk taking and challenging. . . .

Natural male behavior and childhood energy is what is pathologized. Boys who refuse to sit still or exhibit the natural male instinct to play, explore, or rough house are frequently drugged or expelled. Over 20% of boys will be given prescription drug meditation.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Report: 44,000 Voters Registered in Both Maryland and Virginia. Voter fraud? What’s that?

LEARNING MORE about the Y chromosome.

While the X chromosome has remained large throughout evolution, with about 2000 genes, the Y chromosome lost most of its genetic material early in its evolution; it now retains less than 100 of those original genes. That’s led some scientists to hypothesize that the chromosome is largely indispensable and could shrink away entirely.

To determine which Y chromosome genes are shared across species, Daniel Winston Bellott, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues compared the Y chromosomes of eight mammals, including humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, mice, rats, bulls, and opossums. The overlap, they found, wasn’t just in those genes known to determine the sex of an embryo. Eighteen diverse genes stood out as being highly similar between the species. The genes had broad functions including controlling the expression of genes in many other areas of the genome. The fact that all the species have retained these genes, despite massive changes to the overall Y chromosome, hints that they’re vital to mammalian survival.

TWIST THE KNIFE: Driver that struck teen suing dead boy’s family.

Brandon was struck from behind by an SUV and killed while his friend Richard McLean, 16, was seriously injured with a broken pelvis and other bones. His other pal Jake Roberts, 16, was knocked off his bike but sustained only scratches.

Now the driver of the SUV, Sharlene Simon, 42, a mother of three, formerly from Innisfil, is suing the dead boy for the emotional trauma she says she has suffered. She’s also suing the two other boys, as well as the dead boy’s parents, and even his brother, who has since died. She’s also suing the County of Simcoe for failing to maintain the road.

WOMAN GETS OFF EASY: Denise Keesee gets 30 days, then probation, for sexually abusing 16-year-old student. I appreciate how this article was written. It starts,

Denise Keesee cried throughout her sentencing Monday in Washington County Circuit Court. She sobbed. She bawled.

Her chin quivered hard. She dabbed a tissue at her cheeks.

It ends,

After Monday’s hearing, Denise Keesee left the courtroom dry-eyed.

Mission accomplished.

FALL-BACK OPTION: MASS IMMIGRATION. Apple, Google will pay 64,000 engineers to avoid trial on “no-poach” deal. “By agreeing to not compete for each others’ employees, the companies had formed a kind of anticompetitive cabal that kept engineers’ wages down.”

STEVE SAILER: State Dept.: Putin invades Ukraine with Duck Dynasty. “A lot of the American media coverage of Ukraine reminds me of Kennedy Era coverage of Vietnam, when reporters went over to this strange country and got briefed by the State Department and CIA and came back and filed gung ho stories.”

PRIORITIES: US Government Promoting Islam in Czech Republic.

REVERSE REVERSE SEXISM: Claim: Female guards are prone to seduction, can’t be trusted. That or they’re malicious molesters. Pick one.

Last year, the Department of Justice completed its study of sexual abuse in adult prisons and juvenile facilities. It wasn’t a happy time for feminists. The studies showed that most of the sexual abuse of inmates is committed by guards and most of that is committed by female guards. . . .

So, what to do? Well, if you’re Adèle Mercier, you simply drop all pretense of intellectual integrity and claim that, in the case of boys abused in juvenile facilities, “they were asking for it.” . . .

So much for the juvenile facilities, but what about the adult ones? We now have our answer. It appears in a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin.

Toobin peddles the standard feminist line that somehow the sexual contact between the men in cages and the women who held the keys was a matter of – what else? – male power and female helplessness. He doesn’t waste much time getting to the point. Just 600 words into a 5,200-word article Toobin says, “Cynical and devious men succeeded in dominating women who were nominally their keepers.”

“Nominally”? As if the cells and keys are merely nominal! If the truth is that prisoners are simply manipulating female guards, then the obvious course of action is to replace the guards with men who, unlike women, are actually in control of their mental faculties.

Earlier: Prison boss ‘had a two-year affair with Britain’s biggest gangster – in his own jail cell.

Related: Tavon White of Black Guerilla Family prison gang “fathered five children with four of the corrections officers”.

“HOW QUICKLY YESTERDAY’S PLEAS FOR MERE TOLERANCE of sexual behavior ‘outside the mainstream’ can morph into mandates for active approval of that behavior.”

The task force called for vastly expanding the scope of prohibited student speech and conduct. . . . It recommended that students be punished for even one word that another student (especially those in protected groups) could claim to find “humiliating” or “offensive” . . .

This would open the way for what appears to be Safe Schools supporters’ primary goal: mandatory, state-sponsored reeducation on sexual matters for all K–12 Minnesota students. . . . Schools would be required to consult with “community-based advocacy groups” . . .

If the Safe and Supportive Schools Act becomes law, this year or in the future, Minnesota schools are likely to turn for guidance on curriculum and training to OutFront and groups and resources it recommends.

One such resource is the “Welcoming Schools” curriculum, a K–5 anti-bullying program . . .

Welcoming Schools has little to do with bullying and much to do with ensuring that kids as young as age five are taught HRC’s views on sexuality and family structure. In its original form, the curriculum advised teachers not to call students “boys and girls,” on grounds that this can create “internal dissonance” in some children. It called for students to read books like The Sissy Duckling and to be evaluated on “whether or not [they] feel comfortable making choices outside gender expectations.” Kids in grades three to five “acted out” being members of nontraditional families, including families headed by same-sex couples. . . .

GLSEN asserts that “safe” schools need LGBT-“affirming” curricula. “LGBT people, history, and events can be easily inserted into most content areas,” it declares.

In a safe school, for example, science teachers “acknowledge the gay identity of Francis Bacon (creator of the scientific method),” while art teachers identify the artist Frida Kahlo as bisexual. In math class, students analyze “LGBT demographic trends”—for instance, creating charts illustrating the “number of same-sex couples raising children” or the “number of adopted or foster children in LGBT-headed households.”

What’s the point of these sorts of lessons? It’s simple, according to one homosexual columnist. It’s about recruitment:

“Why would we push anti-bullying programs or social studies classes that teach kids about the historical contributions of famous queers unless we wanted to deliberately educate children to accept queer sexuality as normal?” wrote Daniel Villarreal in a 2011 piece that appeared on the popular gay site Queerty.com.

“Recruiting children? You bet we are,” he said.

“We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality. In fact, our very future depends on it.”

“And I would very much like for many of these young boys to grow up and start f**ing men,” he said.

FOR THE LADIES: Stressed out women may have a harder time getting pregnant, study finds.

WHICH SEX Is More Responsible For Divorce?

Wives are now incentivized to divorce by the alimony retirement plan racket, the anti-male divorce industrial complex, and the practical guarantee of child custody. The data — especially the “wives initiate 70% of divorces” figure — strongly suggest that [this] view is the correct one.

But [some] claim that figure could just as easily mean that 70% of husbands are sh*tty spouses. Well, maybe. But that interpretation is no less speculative than the opposite, and in fact is less sustainable under scrutiny, because the simpler explanation for the 70% female divorce-initiation figure is that men and women are about equally represented among the crappy spouse demographic, but women initiate more divorces because they perceive that a host of benefits will accrue to them from severing their marriages. Husbands, in contrast, perceive no such benefits, and are thus more loathe to divorce even when their wives are insufferable.

One way to test this hypothesis . . . is to look at which sex initiates more non-marital break-ups. If men really are crappier partners than women, then the break-up initiation rate will be roughly the same inside and outside of marriage. The break-up initiation rate should skew approximately 70% in favor of women in whatever form of relationship they’re in. The premise behind this assumption is that a person’s romantic character or “livability” traits are fairly constant throughout life.

Using the variable FAMPER3 (“During the last year, did you… 3. Break up with a steady boyfriend/girlfriend or fiance?”) from the General Social Survey (GSS) dataset, we find that men broke up their non-marital relationships almost twice as often as did women.

RUSSIA: Lower house passes bill to punish swearing in public, film.

ACE: Group Objects to Mentioning “Islam” or “Jihad” in Film Explaining 9/11 To Be Shown at the 9/11 Museum.

Politics is just downstream of culture.

If the public demands censorship by mob justice, the government — which is not a principled institution, but a favor-for-favor system of legal quid pro quos — will eventually see the benefit of censorship by mob as well.

Which is why I find this current folly more worrisome than AllahPundit. He may be right that this attempt at rewriting history For Social Justice will fail, as it’s simply too ludicrous to win the day.

But even if it doesn’t win the day, it is apparently now a proposition that People Must Take Seriously.

LAURA WOOD: The Phonecall “Pope” Throws Marriage Under the Bus.

“AN ABORTION WILL FURTHER MY CAREER”: Josie Cunningham case shows real reasons some women choose abortion.

“I’m finally on the verge of becoming famous and I’m not going to ruin it now.

“An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way.”

Josie, 23, is already 18 weeks pregnant by either an escort agency client or a Premier League footballer.

W. BRADFORD WILCOX: Dad and the diploma: The difference fathers make for college graduation. “I find that young adults who as teens had involved fathers are significantly more likely to graduate from college, and that young adults from more privileged backgrounds are especially likely to have had an involved father in their lives as teens.”

JOHN S. ROSENBERG: Misremembering the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The crystal clear text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act runs directly counter to current orthodoxy — prevalent especially on college campuses — equating civil rights with affirmative action and affirmative action with race preferences. Of special concern because of its jurisdiction over aid to higher education, for example, Title VI provides that “no person” — not no black, Hispanic, or minority person — “shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Nor was the meaning of “discrimination” unclear or ambiguous in 1964. As Senator Humphrey said during floor debate, “What it really means in the bill is a distinction in treatment . . . given to different individuals because of their different race, religion or national origin.” (110 Cong. Rec. 5864 [1964], quoted by Justice Stevens in his Bakke opinion.) The Democrats in Austin not surprisingly neglected to note — if, indeed, any of them even know — that the 1964 Democratic Platform renounced not only “quotas based on the same false distinctions we seek to erase” but also forthrightly rejected “the expedient of preferential practices.”

Before the 50th anniversary celebrations of the civil rights act fade away there will no doubt be many other attempts, as there were in Austin, to enlist LBJ as the progenitor of affirmative action. Those attempts, though ubiquitous, are unpersuasive and should be rejected.

PATTERICO: First-World Problems for Women. “A conservative Daily Show (if such a thing existed, and it should) would send a correspondent to one of these latter places, where folks are committing honor killings and kidnappings, and ask them about, say, the gendered Happy Meal toys. ‘Yes, I know, girls are getting kidnapped from schools. You already said that. But I’m trying to ask about these Happy Meal toys . . .'”